Articles
Richard M Weber, MBA, CLU
Mission Statement:
The Ethical Edge seeks to enlighten professional and financial advisors about issues with which their clients often struggle when managing their policies. Services include objective, FEE-ONLY assessment of new and in-force policies, as well as provision of educational seminars and tutorials to advisors about insurance issues that are not available from insurance companies or their agents. Ethical Edge also provides education and training to advisors who wish to counsel and mentor their clients how to thrive beyond midlife in all aspects of living, not just financially.
Experience:
For 25 years a successful life insurance salesman, Dick Weber joined Merrill Lynch Insurance Group, and from late-1993 to the end of 1995 was Vice President and Manager of Client Education and Field Development. For this “tour” in upper management with a life insurance carrier, his responsibilities included developing communication programs which enhance client understanding of insurance products and reconciling product performance against product expectations.
Since then, Dick founded and is President of The Ethical Edge, Inc., providing training and consulting services that help empower advisors, agents, and their clients to explore and view life insurance in the broader context of financial planning. During this same period, Dick was a co-developer of Dynamic Insurance Solutions and Historic Variability Module – computer-based tools that have begun to revolutionize the way advisors and their clients view life insurance products.
Among his various teaching activities, Dick served for 11 years as an Instructor of Insurance at the University of California at Berkeley’s Program in Personal Financial Planning; from 1993 through 1998, he served as Adjunct Professor of Ethics at the American College in Bryn Mawr, Pa. Dick holds an M.B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley with a specialty in Insurance and Finance. With a publication record of 150 issues, Dick’s monthly “Due Care” column for Life Insurance Selling (1990 – 2001) was one of the few agent-focused tutorials for ethical selling during the industry’s most turbulent decade.
His current book, Revealing Life Insurance Secrets: How the pros pick, design, and evaluate their own policies, is published by Marketplace Books and is directed at advisors and financial service professionals. In 1993, Dick represented the Society of Financial Service Professionals in an unprecedented series of 25 Due Care Workshops presented around the country. The Workshops introduced to agents and allied professionals the American Society’s Life Insurance Illustration Questionnaire (“IQ”). The Workshops also focused on what the agents can do with the information contained in their carrier’s response to the “IQ” and how to return to a more fundamental, ethical, and educational form of selling the life insurance product.
A second multi-city tour of workshops was presented in 1999. Dick served as a Qualified Independent Assessor from 1997-99 and 2004-05 for the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association (IMSA), a voluntary standards setting organization promoting ethical market conduct and compliance standards for its qualified life insurance companies.
